I do believe that there is a place in the media for film criticism. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that the best film critics are culturally invaluable for their ability to engage the public with informed discussions about art. What I do not believe, however, is that the mainstream media has maintained these standards of journalism over the past number of years – years wherein many of the most prolific entertainment journalists have gradually come to conflate their responsibility to analyse cinema with an opportunity to protect their own platforms.
Most recently, this has manifested in the controversy surrounding Sia’s feature debut Music (2021), the plot of which concerns an autistic teenager named Music (Maddie Ziegler), and has received considerable criticism from the autistic community for stigmatising and exploiting the disability on screen. Ziegler herself is not autistic, and reportedly told her director that she didn’t “want anyone to think I’m making fun of them”, which evidently fell on deaf ears given the final product. Sia herself has written (and since deleted) several tweets claiming that “casting someone at [Music’s] level of functioning was cruel, not kind,” before going on to tell an autistic actor who said they would have been happy to play the role that “maybe you’re just a bad actor.” Needless to say, it is transparently clear that Sia did not have the interests of actual autistic people at heart.
It is my opinion then, that film critics should be responsible for documenting and building a conversation around Music’s failure to connect with the audience it claims to represent. Unfortunately, this has not necessarily been the case, with the Irish Times review writing that “casting someone as far along the autism spectrum as Music, the title character, would be highly unethical, not to mention logistically problematic.” Sound familiar? The Times’ defence of the film mirrors Sia’s ableist excuse for discriminating against disabled actors almost word-for-word. This review has been up for three days at the time of writing without a disclaimer or apology in sight, despite vocal online outcry from readers including popular autistic comedian Aoife O’Dooley.
This is not the first time even in the past year that film journalists have defended one another against those who have been the most hurt by their ill-informed articles. In December, Carey Mulligan went on the record in an interview with The New York Times expressing her offence at Variety’s review of her new film Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020), which she accused of claiming that she “wasn’t hot enough” to convincingly play the lead of the film. The article does in fact describe her appearance as resembling “bad drag”, and was promptly updated with an editor’s note apologising to Mulligan.
Inexplicably, this apology was met with outrage from numerous popular film critics who insisted that Variety should have stood by their writer, ethical standards be damned. The US National Society of Film Critics even got involved, issuing a statement which read more like it was casting the blame at Mulligan’s feet than anything else, taking care to note that Mulligan’s interview came “almost a year later and in the thick of awards season”, all but dismissing her offence as nothing but a publicity stunt.
This approach to journalism is deeply troubling. Writers should not be immune to criticism; their word is not law. While I do of course believe in freedom of speech, I also believe in the importance of consequences. If an article proves careless, even in the perfectly understandable cases where such issues are accidental, then it is the responsibility of the authors and publishers to acknowledge this, even if only in the form of a disclaimer placed before an otherwise unedited review. Conceding an error is not an admission of defeat, rather a show of integrity, and the sooner the mainstream media can come to understand this, the healthier and more supportive this industry will be for people of all demographics.
